


Knave of Hearts

by duh_i_read (duh_i_write)



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Gambling, Gen, Male-Female Friendship, Post-Canon, ignores the comics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-31
Updated: 2010-01-31
Packaged: 2017-10-06 21:14:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/57818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/duh_i_write/pseuds/duh_i_read
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dawn learned other skills in Sunnydale besides how to kill demons.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Knave of Hearts

**Author's Note:**

> Post Chosen.

"Dealers choice," Donnie said, taking a sip of his beer.

"Texas hold 'em," Dawn said, flicking cards across the bedspread to Donnie, herself, and Donnie's roommate Mark.

"Where'd you learn how to play poker, Summers?" Mark asked, trying to keep a blank face as he glanced at his cards, but the quick curl of his brow gave it away. Low hand.

"A friend," she said, flipping four cards over before looking at her own cards. The queen and jack of hearts.

"Same friend who taught you how to pick locks?" Donnie asked. The perpetual smile he wore revealed no tell, and a low familiar voice in her head whispered _can't trust a bloke you can't read, Pigeon._

They were playing with Strongbow bottle caps, but it just as easily could have been pennies from her owl bank, the one her mom got her from the flea market. In her memory, he is alive, the most thrilling thing ever to sit on her lavender sheets, teaching her how to count cards. From that first harrowing week, one of the tiny voices she thought with sounded like him.

_This is only useful math I find, an' the one useful for parting college boys out of their trust funds._

She tried to exorcise him, not think about him, and it would work for days, maybe a week, until someone said 'Luv' in a certain way or she heard the Ramones or a blue eyed man would smile at her, and she'd be thrown back to Sunnydale where the jacks were knaves and she would steal sips of liquor that tasted much like how rocket fuel might taste.

Especially here, in her tiny Oxford dorm, cheating her grinning boyfriend and his roommate out of their beer and books money; she was never far from the card games with Giles or Anya or Tara where she practiced reading people, Spike's tutelage whispered in her ear.

_Watch the eyes, Bit. They tend to give the most away._

How true. It didn't take Dawn long to figure out that Spike was all eyes, eyes and lips that gave him away every time. Not with the cards, no, never with the cards. But that game he played with her sister, his hand always played face up and the stakes far too high for her.

She was nothing like her sister: she read the tells well.

Dawn smoothed her features, weighing the odds that she had the best hand and raised her bet. She is never far from Sunnydale, and in her heart of hearts, her Knave is laughing.


End file.
